How High’s The Water, Mama?

With a hat tip to reader Bill K., here’s a dark post from Richard Fernandez on the modern world’s growing “compassion fatigue” in the face of spreading chaos. I’ll excerpt the post’s closing lines:

The first rule of civilization is to preserve it. Once enough of it is conceded to barbarism, when a sufficient quantity of it has been worn away then things tip over entirely into savagery. It goes right over the cliff. The lesson of the Second World War was that anyone, pushed hard enough, could be an animal. We’re not there yet. But we’re on the way.

As John Derbyshire reminds us, the truth — and a bleak truth it is — is in the numbers.

9 Comments

Whitewall says

How High’s The Water, Mama? I have come to appreciate the high culture of this blog. “The man in black” would be pleased.

The human animal only has so much compassion to give. America can’t absorb all of Latin America, Europe can’t do the same with North Africa and so on. The migrations must stop. If advanced countries allow too much of the third world in, there will be no advanced countries. Some countries and even regions are undergoing cultural turmoil. These places have done it before. Many are going to die. When possible, the West should give these nations the means to heal themselves in place. The world will not improve by allowing masses of people to constantly be on the move. They will soon have to stand and fight on their own soil.

A point not often made is that to the extent, as we are so often told, that immigrants from all over should be allowed in because they are the ones who, in contrast to shiftless and complacent Americans, have the vitality and ambition to prop up a sagging and exhausted nation, they are of course depriving the places they came from of their talents. It’s the same “boiling off” I described in a recent post, and serves to concentrate the dysfunction of already dysfunctional places.

That said, I can hardly blame anyone for wanting to leave such places. I would do the same, I’m sure.

The points you guys make should be so self evident to any reasonable person, it’s a wonder you have to make them, over and over again. What does that say about the cognitive abilities of our “reasonable” society?

I am pretty sure there were many lessons learned from the upheavals of World War Two. One of them was that Hitler was a stupid f*ck (as was Napoleon): If you are going to invade Russia, bring warm uniforms. Another one was what I call the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not f*ck with America.

If there is any lesson at all that the Western world seems to have learned from WWII, it is that even the slightest whiff of realism about differences between the world’s various peoples can lead directly to another Holocaust — and that as a result we all now must enforce, as a matter of absolute orthodoxy and immovable social principle, the belief that all human groups are completely alike in every way that could possibly matter, and are therefore completely interchangeable.

If there is a lesson we did NOT learn, it is that when an enemy repeatedly insists that it wishes to destroy you, it will do so if given the chance.

Post WW2 and more exactly Cold War, the concept of multiculturalism has slowly crept into the movement of peoples narrative and its proponents use it in an effort to convince us that human groups are pretty much interchangeable. It has been said that history repeats but it is more likely that people just repeat history. There is more than one way for one group of people to destroy another.